Reviews

HARMFUL TO MINORS: The Perils of Protecting Children From
Sex,by Judith Levine (University of Minnesota, 296 pages,
$25.95).

Throughout the past decade, a battle has raged in schools between
proponents of comprehensive and abstinence-only sex education. The
latter contingent wants educators to teach students, through popular
programs such as "Sex Respect," to simply say no. The other camp,
meanwhile, wants kids to learn about safe sex in addition to the
abstinence option.

In her smartly contrarian and controversial book—several big
publishers rejected it—New York journalist Levine rues the fact
that the abstinence-only forces have, for the time being, won the day.
States that accept any of the millions of federal dollars available for
sex education, she points out, must instruct young people that
nonmarital sex "is likely to have harmful psychological and social
effects." This emphasis on chastity is part of what Levine sees as a
national sex panic, the unfortunate assumption being that teen sex
leads kids to ruin.

At the center of Levine's argument is her belief that premarital and
adolescent sexual activity is not necessarily harmful to youngsters.
After all, she points out, some 90 percent of Americans, and 50 percent
of teenagers, have sex before marriage, and most go on to lead fairly
well-adjusted lives.

What harms young people, Levine believes, is not sex—she
asserts that "teenagers can have sexual pleasure and be safe,
too"—but the way it has been stigmatized by a strange alliance of
religious conservatives and misled feminists. The conservatives believe
that adolescent sexuality is morally corrupting and inevitably leads to
disease, while the feminists insist that teenage sex is really about
young girls being victimized by unsavory boys and men. What is similar
about their views is that both deny or fail to address the centrality
of human sexual desire, especially when it comes to teenage girls.
Reading some of the popular feminist-oriented literature on adolescent
girls, such as Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, one gets the
impression that teens only have sex because they're sad, disturbed, or
hooked on drugs—never because they actually desire it.

Parents and educators, of course, want to protect children from the
very real dangers of sex: disease and unwanted pregnancy. But Levine
contends that scare tactics are both misguided and bound to fail. Young
people, she argues, live in a sex-saturated culture and perceive
abstinence-only messages as hypocritical. What's more, she writes, the
"just say no" approach does absolutely nothing to safely guide the many
teenagers who decide to have sex.

Some readers will undoubtedly take issue with Levine's beliefs and
conclusions, especially since rates of teen pregnancy have dropped in
recent years. (For this, Levine credits increased acceptance and
availability of condoms, not abstinence-only sex ed programs.) Many
will view the book as little more than a sustained plea for the
acceptance of teen sex and comprehensive sex education.

But to her credit, Levine also criticizes organizations firmly in
the comprehensive camp, such as the prominent Sex Information and
Education Council of the United States. While the chastity forces
suggest that sex invariably leads to tragedy, the other side, she
argues, too often pretends "that teens' sexuality can be rational,
protected, and heartbreak- free." Both positions, she suggests, are
inherently dishonest.

In the end, what makes Levine's book so alluring is not only that it
challenges current notions about teen sexuality, but also that it
questions the extent to which parents and educators can control young
people at all. Too many baby boomer parents, she writes, believe that
they should "be involved in all aspects of their children's lives, from
soccer to sex," and that this involvement will ensure healthy and
productive futures for their youngsters. But after a certain point,
parents need to let up and let go. The best thing adults can offer kids
is not hollow words and slogans, but a good example.

FREE SCHOOLS, FREE PEOPLE: Education and Democracy After the
1960s,by Ron Miller (State University of New York Press, 220
pages, $22.95).

My impression of the free schools of the early 1970s was formed one
day when I visited a friend who had transferred to one. As I recall,
several students spent much of the afternoon smoking marijuana with a
teacher, an Allen Ginsberg look-alike who occasionally slipped into
what appeared to be a meditative trance but was more likely just a
drug-induced stupor.

Admittedly, this is a stereotypical snapshot that probably says
little about what went on at most free schools. But it's the kind of
impression, Miller suggests in this interesting history of
counterculture schooling, that caused the free school movement to flame
out after peaking in the mid-'70s with about 1,000 schools nationwide.
The educators who operated these schools believed above all else that
children are inherently curious and that, when freed from competition
and threats, they'd pursue knowledge on their own.

The problem, Miller argues, is that this belief in kids' natural
curiosity became tangled up in an exaggeratedly romantic idea of the
child as a saint, a pure seeker of truth. When the desires and pursuits
of youngsters inevitably turned out to be less than innocent, the
adults simply didn't know how to respond.

Despite the collapse of the free school movement, Miller, president
of the Vermont-based Foundation for Educational Renewal, sees much in
it that was positive. He argues that many of the so-called innovations
now popular among charter and other alternative schools—their
emphasis on small size, nonhierarchical administrative structures, and
close-knit educational communities, to name a few—actually had
their origins decades ago in free schools. Indeed, the free school
legacy, Miller concludes, made the very notion of alternative schooling
"legitimate and commonplace in a way that was inconceivable before the
1960s."

School voucher advocates have long maintained that heightened
educational competition within communities would force public schools
to make dramatic changes. But in this revealing and timely book, Hess,
a professor of government and education at the University of Virginia,
argues that the changes induced by vouchers thus far have been much
smaller and more gradual than proponents had hoped.

In the three voucher cities he studied—Milwaukee, Cleveland,
and Edgewood, Texas, a community just outside San Antonio—Hess
found that school districts were more likely to respond to the
competition with public relations initiatives than with true
"performance oriented" improvements. District officials, he writes,
would boldly announce innovative new programs that never actually
reached the schools.

This is not to say that the public schools made no changes at all.
In Milwaukee, for example, the teachers' union eventually eased some of
its rigid policies, allowing the district to be more responsive and
flexible. And Edgewood adopted an open enrollment program that lets
parents send their children to any school districtwide. But Hess
insightfully concludes that vouchers have proved to be less a "market
bulldozer" than a "pickax," something public school officials can use
"to chip away at regulations and bureaucracy."

—David Ruenzel

Vol. 14, Issue 3, Page 43

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